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Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa."
An article contesting the phallocentricity of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, urging women to write and make their voices heard through "female-sexed" texts. Annotation Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society Vol. 1 no. 4 (1976): 875-893. Print. Quotes and Notes “Woman must put herself into the text--as into the world and into history--by her own movement.” (875) “...there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman.” (876) “Beauty will no longer be forbidden.” (876) “Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a...divine composure), hasn’t accused herself of being a monster?” (emphasis mine, 876) “Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don’t like the true texts of women--female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.” (877) “Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs.” (878) “It is time to liberate the New Woman from the Old by coming to know her--by loving her for getting by, for getting beyond the Old without delay, by going out ahead of what the New Woman will be, as an arrow quits the bow with a movement that gathers and separates the vibrations musically, in order to be more than her self.” (878) Ties back to Peggy Orenstein and the “Good Woman”/“New Woman” binary mentioned in the introduction of Flux On the increase of women writers: “This is a useless and deceptive fact unless from their species of female writers we do not first deduct the immense majority whose workmanship is in no way different from male writing, and which either obscures women or reproduces the classic representations of women (as sensitive--intuitive--dreamy, etc.)” (878) “...that this typically masculine writing “economy” is a locus where the repression of women has been perpetuated, over and over, more or less consciously, and in a manner that’s frightening since it’s often hidden or adorned with the mystifying charms of fiction…” (879) “It has been one with the phallocentric tradition.” (879) “But only the poets--not the novelists, allies of representationalism.” (879) “Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.” (880) “...it writing will tear her away from the superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty (guilty of everything, guilty at every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being frigid, for being ‘too hot’; for not being both at once; for being too motherly and not enough; for having children and for not having any; for nursing and for not nursing...)--tear her away by means of this research, this job of analysis and illumination, this emancipation of the marvelous text of her self that she must urgently learn to speak.” (emphasis mine, 880) Goes back to the unwinnable binaries mentioned in essentially all of the texts I have looked into. It is particularly interesting that this ties into the self-blame of many women as they relate to motherhood specifically. The nursing dilemma links to the CNN “unnatural mother” article, binary of having/not having children speaks back to Almond’s quote implying that, in our society, only the non-mom is held as worse than the bad-mom. “Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak.” (880) Liberation “...by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus…” (881) “In fact, she physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body.” (881) TRANSFORMATIONS. Think like a monster, become a monster. This is especially interesting in relation to the [http://monster-mothers.wikia.com/wiki/Lapham,_David._Crossed:_Family_Values. Crossed] mom. “How else was I going to do the fucking?” (Issue 3 Page 17) meaning, how else was she going to seek a sexually violent revenge on the father for the repeated rapes of her daughters? Must transform herself into a monster, and give herself a phallus (via the knife inserted into her vagina), in order to become as sexually aggressive, violent, and awful as her husband. To gain control and be violent, she must transform (though hers is a selective transformation), distancing herself from the act by allowing her “monster” self to perform the mutilation/murder. The more “evil” a mother gets, the more her body changes. Think Carol Tyler and Bedlam from Coraline , and Helen Grady from Silent Hill: Origins , and pretty much every “monster mom” I’ve encountered. The mother either takes on monstrous qualities (physically) or behaviors; is seen as “out of her body” or “possessed” (i.e. Agave from [http://monster-mothers.wikia.com/wiki/Euripides._The_Bacchae. The Bacchae] , Sethe from [http://monster-mothers.wikia.com/wiki/Morrison,_Toni._Beloved. Beloved] ); or animalistic (i.e. Sethe, mom from [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEoCxWFkuME The Amazing World of Gumball], Queen Elinor from Brave) “Even if phallic mystification has generally contaminated good relationships, a woman is never far from ‘mother’ (I mean outside her role functions: the ‘mother’ as nonname and as source of goods). There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk.” (881) Mother as a person/role who loses their identity and simply becomes a “resource bank;” a constant giver. “There always remains in woman that force which produces/is produced by the other--in particular, the other woman. In her, matrix, cradler; herself giver as her mother and child; she is her own sister-daughter. You might object,'' ‘What about she who is the hysterical offspring of a bad mother?’ Everything will be changed once woman gives woman to the other woman. There is hidden and always ready in woman the source; the locus for the other. The mother, too, is a metaphor. It is necessary and sufficient that the best of herself be given to woman by another woman for her to be able to love herself and return in love the body that was ‘born’ to her.” (emphasis mine, 881) Thoughts on hereditary badness. Think ''The Bad Seed and much of what Almond suggests about fear of monstrous births and fear of the evil that one’s womb will/can produce. “I don’t mean the overbearing, clutchy ‘mother’ but, rather, what touches you, the equivoice that affects you, fills your breast with an urge to come to language and launches your force…” (882) Good “mother” as an inspiring, but not vampyric mother that Almond talks about “In women there is always more or less of the mother who makes everything all right, who nourishes, and who stands up against separation; a force that will not be cut off but will knock the wind out of the codes.” (882) “As subject for history, woman always occurs simultaneously in several places.” (882) “...that the act of writing is equivalent to masculine masturbation…” (883) --> idea as a flawed way of thinking that erases female-sexed writing or particularly feminine texts “...as with all the ‘human’ sciences, it reproduces the masculine view, of which it is one of the effects.” (884) “It experience is still unexplored only because we’ve been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable.” (884-885) “They riveted us between two horrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss.” (885) “But isn’t this fear convenient for them? Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.” (emphasis mine, 885) “We’ve been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty; we’ve been made victims of the old fool’s game: each one will love the other sex.” (885) “They have furiously inhabited these sumptuous bodies: admirable hysterics who made Freud succumb to many voluptuous moments impossible to confess, bombarding his Mosaic statue with their carnal and passionate body words, haunting him with their inaudible and thundering denunciations, dazzling, more than naked underneath the seven veils of modesty.” (886) Hysteria as an extension/element of monstrosity. “For a long time it has been in body that women have responded to persecution, to the familial-conjugal enterprise of domestication, to the repeated attempts at castrating them. Those who have turned their tongues 10,000 times seven times before not speaking are either dead from it or more familiar with their tongues and their mouths than anyone else.” (886-887) “Nor is the point to appropriate their instruments, their concepts, their places, or to begrudge them their position of mastery.” (887) “Either you want a kid or you don’t--''that’s your business''. Let nobody threaten you; in satisfying your desire, let not the fear of becoming the accomplice to a sociality succeed the old-time fear of being ‘taken.’” (Cixous’s emphasis, 890) “This says a lot about the power she seems invested with at the time, because it has always been suspected, that, when pregnant, the woman not only doubles her market value, but--what’s more important--takes on intrinsic value as a woman in her own eyes and, undeniably, acquires body and sex.” (891) “There are thousands of ways of living one’s pregnancy; to have or not to have with that still invisible other a relationship of another intensity. And if you don’t have that particular yearning, it doesn’t mean that you’re in any way lacking. Each body distributes in its own special way, without model or norm, the nonfinite and changing totality of its desires. Decide for yourself on your position in the arena of contradictions, where pleasure and reality embrace.” (emphasis mine, 891) On the continued desire of some women for the phallus in their lover: “But not because she is gelded; not because she’s deprived and needs to be filled out, like some wounded person who wants to console herself or seek vengeance: I don’t want a penis to decorate my body with.” (891) “We are pieced back to the string which leads back, if not to the Name-of-the-Father, then, for a new twist, to the place of the phallic-mother.” (892)